“Not necessarily. You can take the place of that last sacrifice yourself. Kossal and I will see to it.”
The words were level, even encouraging, but I couldn’t find any comfort in them. It wasn’t that I was afraid to die. Anyone raised in Rassambur comes to peace with the notion of her own unmaking. Ananshael’s mercy and justice extend even to us. Especially to us. A priestess unwilling to make an offering of herself is no priestess at all, but a mere murderer. I understood that even then. It wasn’t the prospect of my own death that bothered me, but of my failure. So much about Ananshael’s art had come to me so easily for so long; it seemed unfair that I should come up against such an abrupt, unexpected impossibility.
“Who’s the judge?” I asked quietly.
“Judge?”
“Yes, the judge. About love. Who decides?”
“Ah.” Ela turned from the immensity of the night to face me. “Kossal and I will decide in concert.”
“And if I lie?”
The priestess tsked. “Generally, we hope for a little more piety from those approaching the Trial.”
“The piety will be the pile of bodies,” I replied grimly. “It’s something I’ve always admired about our god—he abides no lies. When the life goes from a woman, it is gone. Love, though…” I blew out a long, frustrated breath. “Anyone can fake it. Fakery is built into it.”
“Spoken like a girl who has never been in love.”
“How will you know?” I insisted. “If I find someone, if I say I’m in love, if I insist on it, how will you know?”
“There is a shape to love, a pattern to the way it moves in us, through us. Between us.”
“What are you? A priestess of death, or a ’Kent-kissing poet?”
I regretted the words even as I spoke. Ela was only ten years older than me, only ten years clear of her own Trial, but she had already become half a legend in Rassambur. At the age of twenty-eight, following one of our god’s inscrutable commands, she had traveled to Badrikas-Rama, found a way inside the ancient, unbroken walls of the Palace of Evening Waves, slipped past the Dusk Guards, and strangled the oldest Manjari prince. It was an act of devotion that many had deemed impossible. Then, the next night, she went back and killed his brother. This was the woman whose piety I had impugned; I half expected her to shove me from the ledge. Instead, she chuckled.
“I’d like to think a woman can be both. She can be more. The nights I’ve spent tangled in someone else’s arms don’t diminish my devotion to the god. You can hold a knife to a woman’s throat…” she began, and then, in a motion so fast I could barely follow, her knife was free of its sheath and pressed against my skin. Her dark eyes sparkled starlight. “… And, if you were so inclined, you could kiss her at the same time.”
For half a heartbeat I thought she intended to do just that. For half a heartbeat it felt as though we weren’t standing at the edge of the mesa but hanging just beyond it, buoyed up by the dark, or not buoyed at all, but already falling, the night air so soft against my skin that I hadn’t noticed. This is one of Ananshael’s truths—we are all dying, all the time. Being born is stepping from the cliff’s edge. The only question is what to do while falling.
Ela’s eyes seemed to offer an answer, but it was one I couldn’t understand. Then, quick as it came, the knife was gone, slipped back into the sheath at her belt. She hadn’t stepped back, but she felt farther away, as though some bond between us was suddenly broken. I could have left it there, could have nodded and walked away.
But I’ve never been good at walking away.
“I’m not you,” I said quietly.
Ela nodded. “Nor should you be.”
“The thing that you call love might not be love to me at all.”
“Your hands,” Ela said, taking my wrist, holding the hand up to the moonlight, “are not my hands, but they’re still hands. Your love won’t be mine. This doesn’t mean I can’t see it, know it.”
“And if you’re wrong? What if I fall in love and you don’t even recognize it?”
She took my other hand, then. We stood like lovers at the edge of the cliff, facing each other. I got the sense that she was making her face grave for my sake, the way an adult will feign attention for a furious child. “Then, when I come to kill you, Pyrre, you should fight back.”
1
The creatures of the Shirvian delta are fluent in the language of my lord. Even the smallest have not been made meek. A millipede coiled around a reed can kill a woman with a bite. So can the eye-spider, which is the size of my fingernail. Schools of steel-jawed qirna ply the channels, each fish more tooth than tail; I’ve watched people toss goats to them—an old offering to forbidden gods; it is like watching the animal dissolve into blood and froth. There are crocs in the delta half as old as the Annurian occupation, twenty-five-foot monsters that have lurked in the rushes for a hundred years or more, the most deadly with names passed down from generation to generation: Sweet Kim, Dancer, the Pet. The only thing in the delta that can kill a croc is a jaguar, a fact that might offer some solace if that great cat, too, didn’t feast on human flesh. There are ways to avoid crocs and qirna. Jaguars, though—it’s hopeless. Like trying to hide from a shadow.
Ananshael’s first servants were the beasts. Long before we came, blood-hungry carnivores stalked the earth, each claw and tooth, every twisted sinew a living tool fashioned to the same absolute end. Before the first note of the first human song, there was music: a howl launched from some hungry throat, the rhythm of paws quick through the brush, over the hard-packed dirt, a bright, final squeal, then the silence without which all sound means nothing. The devotion of beasts is crude and unchosen but utterly undiluted.